Sign in

Personality, Anyone?

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting pieces from “The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker,” a collection of the magazine’s finest dispatches from the playing fields, edited by David Remnick and out now from Random House. Today, we’re looking at “Tennis Personalities,” by Martin Amis, from 1994.

The wider world met Alejandro Falla on Monday, when the Colombian tennis player nearly beat Roger Federer in the first round at Wimbledon, in what some have said would have been the greatest upset of all time. That may seem a bit much, but still, it was a big deal, and nearly a bigger one. Federer hadn’t lost in the first round at Wimbledon since 2002. He was just twenty-one then, largely unformed, his play merely hinting at the greatness he would soon achieve, as Calvin Tomkins explains in his piece on Federer’s rivalry with Rafael Nadal in this week’s issue of the magazine (subscription required). (Listen to Tomkins discuss the story here.) Before he became a lock to advance deep into major tournaments, Federer was occasionally lackluster in early matches:

His career until 2004 had been puzzling. He’d lost a lot of matches he should have won, frequently in the first round. The sports writers questioned his mental strength, and wondered whether his prodigious natural gifts—from the start of his career, he was making shots that nobody had even tried before—would ever come together as a package.

Then, that package came together. Since 2003, he’s been to the finals every year at Wimbledon, winning six titles, and losing only once, in 2008 to Rafael Nadal. That’s right, since 2002, he’s lost just one match at the tournament. Monday’s meeting was the third between Falla and Federer in less than a month; Federer had won the first two easily. When asked whether that acquaintance helped his opponent, Federer said, “It shouldn’t have. …He should have known that I was going to beat him. But he forgot.”

That last line was delivered with a smile, surely one of relief, and it’s that combination of charm and self-confidence that has long been Federer’s most beguiling and refreshing public character trait. He’s good; we know it, the other players know it, he knows it. He smiles when he wins, and cries when he loses—just like you or I might, though with much more style and flair.

Federer’s assured good humor put me in mind of Martin Amis’s “Tennis Personalities,” which though just two pages long, is almost by itself worth the price of “The Only Game in Town.” Amis mocks the recurring suggestion that “Modern tennis lacks personalities”—big, brash, oft-gesticulating caricatures that please marketers—by translating the word “personality,” to “an exact synonym of a seven-letter duosyllable starting with an a and ending with e (and also featuring, in order of appearance, an ss, an h, an o, and an l ” He contrasts the game’s famed “personalities”—Ilie Nastase (“an embarrassing narcissist”) Jimmy Connors (“such an out-and-out ‘personality’ that he managed to get into a legal dispute with the president of his own fan club”) and a young Andre Agassi (“the Vegas traffic light”)—with a less notorious but more notable group: “Laver, Rosewall, Ashe: These were dynamic and exemplary figures; they didn’t need ‘personality’ because they had character.”

With searing humor, Amis gets to a vital point about the sport, that at its least appealing, it seems little more than a sweaty fashion show, both in the stands and on the court—a world that cherishes wealth, celebrity, and a level of male misbehavior. (He notes that women’s tennis at the time lacked the beloved jerks found in the men’s game, and it’s not inconsequential that even fifteen years later, the world shuddered when Serena Williams berated an official at the 2009 U.S. Open, where they once marveled at John McEnroe when he did the same thing.) In a line for the ages, Amis dismisses a mid-level European tournament as “ one of those German greed fests where the first prize is something like a gold helicopter.”

Federer has won his share of gold helicopters during the past decade. And Tomkins writes this week that as a junior player, he would often scream on the court or throw other varieties of tantrum. But such antics are far behind him—having given way to a stunning grace—and thus weren’t on display in his near meltdown on Monday. (Though it should be noted that even heroes have their bad moments, as when Federer smashed his racquet during a loss to Novak Djokovic last year in Miami.) The great assholes of tennis may catch our eye—but it’s the steady, poised players who earn a more lasting esteem, something that edges close to adoration. “Some people are so enthralled by the way Roger Federer plays tennis that they can hardly bear to see him lose,” Tomkins writes, placing himself among the faithful. That faith was surely tested on Monday. Will it be rewarded in the rounds to come?

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.